Back in September, 180 LA came to us with an immensely challenging brief: to help create an original track in realtime out of YouTube comments. Enter 2DaysBeats, a two-day live event which saw us work with producer Clams Casino and hip-hop MC Vic Mensa not only to create the brand new tracks "Egyptian Cotton", "Think Sleep" and "Cloud 9", but also to visualize over 10,000 YouTube comments over the course of a ten-hour visual and audio extravaganza.
Directed by Greg Brunkalla, shot on a soundstage in California, and done to showcase HP's new hybrid laptop/tablet, the HP Split x2
One of the first things to implement was a system for managing and sorting all the comments that come in, and then establishing a workflow to assign different comments for visualization to the many artists that we had working on set.
Internally, we divided the visualizations into smaller, slightly less daunting buckets -- things that we could visualize quickly -- and larger, more epic visualizations with serious wow factor.
Listen to what they did.
Comments were moderated in realtime and 'assigned' to a team of artists, who created posters, vinyl stickers and original art using the comments and commenters as source material. Others were rendered out in much bigger ways for the benefit of the track's accompanying music video. Over the course of the event, we also worked hard to establish a workflow that gave us a framework for the run of play of those aggregate ten hours, all the time trying to strike an organizational balance being nimble, responsive and spontaneous on set but without being too loose or too unstructured.
"180 wanted to find a way for YouTube user comments — positive and negative — to affect the track that Clams Casino was creating. Most importantly: they wanted to do it live. I know people appreciate having a chance to influence what they're watching. We've provided this direct connection in a unique way by making users' comments physical and tangible within the studio space. We are celebrating the input by our audience, giving them control and credit."
Greg Brunkalla
- Site Of The Day